SUGAR THE SILENT KILLER (PB)

India has a ravenous appetite
for the sweet stuff, way above any other country, if both traditional and
modern sugars are
counted. We also take excessive amounts of poor-quality carbohydrates,
especially, refined cereals like white rice and white
wheat, sugar-sweetened drinks and fruit juice, sweet treats and savouries,
which ultimately turn into glucose, a simple
sugar the body uses for energy. And Indians today manifest an increased
predilection for diseases linked to sugar (and
the fat with which sugar is inextricably linked): obesity to diabetes,
heart disease to hypertension, cancers to dementia,
Covid-19 to black fungus.

Despite a long association with sugar, there has been very few attempts to understand
sugar’s hold in India. Books have
been written mainly on the sugar industry, some on diabetes and low-sugar
diets. Sugar: The Silent Killer attempts to fill
the lacunae. It attempts to demystify the way we eat now, the pre-eminence
of refined sugar in our diet, what it does to
us and what we can do to mitigate its malign influence. Weaving together
history, culture and science, it seeks to analyse
why we have such an intimate relation with sugar, why it holds on to us so
doggedly, why we do can’t do without it,
even when we know it can harm us.